Saturday, August 13, 2011

Fiction writing lesson #6 : Genres

The last lesson had almost no theory. We spent the greater part of the day going through the works of other writers and coming up with a criticism of their work.

Genres can be thought of as imaginative or realistic.

Imaginative genres include fantasy, science fiction or even wuxia. Law of physics can be bent and it's normally expected that wizards can cast spells.

Realistic genres include detective, romance or historical genre. Even though the events are fictional, they can possibly happen in the real world.

Authors write within genres because it's easier to ease the reader into their world. Bestselling ideas often involve mixing and matching different genres. For example, teenage vampire fiction like the Twilight series mixes the horror and romance genres.

My own personal project which resulted in a Golden Point submission this year is sort of Harry Potter meets Song of Ice and Fire in the Singapore school system.

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